9/10/2011 @ 6:00PM

Hickory Nuts

One fine spring day, dressed in my usual golf attire–plain khaki pants and even plainer white golf polo shirt–I showed up to play in the annual Mid Pines Hickory Open golf championship in Southern Pines, North Carolina.

My sartorial mistake was quickly apparent. Out on the practice range stood half a dozen chaps who appeared to have stepped out of a sepia photograph from the Bobby Jones era. They wore perfectly draped vintage plus fours accessorized with argyle socks, plaid sweater vests, and silk bow ties. Most sported wool or tweed fat caps that in the late 1800s and early 1900s signified the serious player. I felt like a pigeon at a gathering of peacocks. “We have a saying among hickory nuts,”said Ken Holtz, attempting to ease my embarrassment. “If you can’t play great with hickories, you can at least look great.”

Holtz, now an independent marketing consultantfrom Appleton, Wisconsin, had just been reelected president of the Society of Hickory Golfers, a major enthusiast organization. Hickory nuts, as some call themselves, believe golf should be played as it was before the introduction of steel shafts in the mid-1920s–with seven or eight vintage or reproduction wooden-shaft clubs instead of the modern 14-club arsenal of super-forgiving, high-tech equipment. Although golf ‘s growth has flatlined, the SoHG and the regional clubs like the slightly older, Iowa-based Hickory Golf Association are growing rapidly.

“The appeal is a little different for everybody,” Holtz explained. “Some do it because of the challenge of playing with hickory clubs, which can be considerable when you first start out. Others love the tradition and the fellowship that goes along with the whole deal. Golf is the most social game on earth, and hickory nuts tend to be extremely social types.” He smiled, adjusting a silk bow tie that would have sent a clotheshorse like Gene Sarazen in search of his valet. “You have to be in order to dress like this.”

Wandering down the practice range, I spotted my friend Kelly Miller punching artful low-running shots with a mashie, the equivalent of a modern six-or seven-iron. Miller is an outstanding player who simultaneously holds the club championships of the Seminole and Pine Valley golf clubs. His family, the clan of LPGA legend Dame Peggy Kirk Bell, owns the beautiful Mid Pines Inn & Golf Club and its sister club, Pine Needles Lodge, site of three recent U.S. Women’s Open Championships. Miller is in charge of making sure both clubs remain anchored in the past–the way they looked and played when Scotsman Donald Ross designed them during the 1920s golf boom in America. (With its tidy greens and relatively modest 6,600 yards of fairway routed economically over a set of flowering Carolina sand hills, Mid Pines especially delights the golf traditionalist.)

“I’ve been aggressively promoting the virtues of hickory golf with my friends and good players for a decade,” Miller explained, “because playing with hickories brings so much back into the game–particularly the use of strategy. Withhickories, it’s a walking game that’s played close to the ground. It brings back the romance of golf–even if you don’t quite feel the romance yet,” he added with a sly wink at my attire. The revival of hickory golf in America began in 1994 at Oakhurst Golf Links near the 1788 Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as this country’s oldest golf course. There, Lewis Keller, senior owner of the course, golf writer and collector Pete Georgiady, and Georgiady’s son, Bryan, mounted a hickory tournament that attracted 60 top players.

“The tournament was a huge success and really got people thinking and talking about how the game used to be played–a game of strategy and angles and real shotmaking,” Georgiady told me. “The core of the participants came from the Golf Collectors Society, people who had spent years collecting these beautiful old golf clubs made by legendary Scottish makers and had always wondered what it would be like to actually play with them in the conditions that prevailed when they were popular. The National Hickory Championship at Oakhurst gave them that opportunity. Players went away charged up, and we began seeing state and regional hickory events all over America.”

At the same time Tad Moore, whose best-selling modern putter designs for Maxfli and Dunlop captured several major golf championships in the 1990s, started playing with the vintage hickory clubs he’d long taken apart in order to understand the traditional-club maker’s art. In time, he began crafting replica sets and selling them from his Selma, Alabama, workshop. He also started hosting the Southern Hickory Four-Ball tournament, which quickly gained status among enthusiasts.

“What I found was pure revelation–and maybe revolution,” Moore told me as he, Kelly Miller, and I stood on the first tee at Mid Pines.The Mid Pines event has become one of the four major tournaments of hickory golf, along with the Heart of America hickory championship in Omaha, Nebraska; the U.S. Hickory Open at French Lick Resort in French Lick, Indiana; and Moore’s Southern Hickory Four-Ball Championship in Birmingham, Alabama. “Playing with hickories put something back in my game. There’s no sound or feel, for example, like hitting a persimmon-headed driver on the sweet spot.This is a story you hear over and over with hickory player.”

Despite Moore’s and Miller’s coaching efforts, my debut as a hickory player was an exercise in painful enlightenment. Moore’s persimmon-headed clubs made my drives things of beauty, shorter than the ones I achieve with metal, to be sure, yet so sweet in sound and feeling that I was reminded of playing my first round at Mid Pines as a kid. On the other hand, learning the relative distances of hickory-shafted irons is a challenge. All day I kept confusing my mashie with my deep-faced mashie, roughly the lofts of a modern six-iron and eight-iron, respectively, and coming up woefully short of the target. Twice I used a mid iron when I should have used a driving iron and landed more than 40 yards shy of the green, the place where Ross invariably exacts the biggest penalty for a poorly executed shot and where the real headaches began.

I kept trying to pitch with a niblick, the equivalent of a modern nine iron, and, owing to the sharp leading edge of the blade, found myself chili dipping easy shots right and left.

I finished my debut round with a sorry 92, a dozen swipes higher than my conventional handicap. Ready for a cocktail and a little wisdom f rom a modern master of the auld game, I sought out my friend Jay Harris, a retired dentist who has won four of the hickory majors, including 2008′s inaugural U.S. Hickory Open. (He shot a respectable 80.) “What you need to get,” Harris explained to me, “is a jigger club to get the ball on the green and rolling rather than trying to pitch it to the hole the way the modern player would do.” He promised to lend me a jigger, a low-lofted, low-profile club that’s a cross between a putter and a cut-down two-iron, before my next hickory event.

The next morning, I showed up at Mid Pines dressed to the nines in tweed trousers, an argyle sweater vest, and a plaid necktie I had purchased from the Tom Morris Golf Shop in St. Andrews. Maybe looking the part would help with playing the part. Alas, I only managed to beat my maiden hickory score by a single stroke. Jay Harris, meanwhile, won his second major hickory championship of the year. As I was leaving, I spotted Tad Moore and walked over to thank him for the use of his beautiful clubs. He grinned and asked what I thought about hickory golf.

“It felt like an exercise inwalking Darwinism out there,” I admitted, thinking of the father of evolution rather than his relative Bernard Darwin, the great 20th-century golf writer venerated by hickory nuts. But I added that I would certainly try again–next time with a useful vintage jigger in hand.

“Excellent,” Moore said, clapping me warmly on the back. “Bernard, if not Charles Darwin, would be proud of you. Every time out you learn something new–or, if you will, something old.”